Scioscia on Trout: Not finished product yet

Turn to the right when you walk into the Angels' clubhouse at Tempe Diablo Stadium and Mike Trout (the youngest guy in the room) is just another minor-leaguer squeezed into a crowded corner of the clubhouse, sharing a locker with another player who will move over to the minor-league side of the complex soon enough.

But Trout is much more than that -- he is the consensus top prospect in baseball and probably the most-hyped prospect in Angels history thanks to the rise of the Internet.

All that hype is "probably going to tend to be a little more detrimental to young players" than beneficial, Angels manager Mike Scioscia said Sunday.

"With players, if it was going to affect them, it would to be more of a distraction," said Scioscia, a first-round draft pick in the pre-blog, pre-Twitter era 35 years ago. "But that's not what's going to happen with Mike. You can see that.

"This guy's like Teflon. He's all baseball. He's all about going towards a mission. And I think he understands – and I know we understand – he's not the finished product."

As anxious as fans are to see Trout in Anaheim, he is likely to spend most (if not all) of the 2011 season in Double-A and Scioscia emphasized that he still has a lot to learn despite the attempts to plan his Hall of Fame induction now.

"Although he's advanced for any 19-year-old you're going to look at in any era … he's not the finished product," Scioscia said. "He has a great head. He understands that.

"We're excited to see him out there as a player. But we're not expecting him to run the routes (to fly balls) that Torii Hunter ran in center or understand base-running the way Chone Figgins did. He's made a lot of progress. He is advanced. But there is growth he needs before he's a major league player. He understands that. This guy's got a plan every day of what he wants to accomplish and what he wants to work on and he's good at it."

Scioscia dismissed the idea that the great expectations heaped on Trout could be setting him up for disappointment if he were to (gasp) hit a mere-mortal .260, say, in Double-A this summer.

"Who's hyping him?" Scioscia asked rhetorically. "It really doesn't matter what's out there. It doesn't matter if you think he should be here or what a fan thinks. It's really what he can do on the field and what do we see.

"I think what's more important is that we see the potential in him. We know how hard it is to hit that potential. This guy is gonna be a good player very soon. What his numbers are gonna be, nobody knows. What's he gonna be 10 years from now? Nobody knows. But we have a grasp of what's real and what we look for him to do. … We know what he has to work on and what he has to do and he's going to get there."

Trout's father, Jeff, also played professional baseball, reaching Double-A in the Minnesota Twins' organization. Having his father's guidance through the first two years of his career has "definitely" been a plus, the younger Trout said.

"He's always told me what I'm going to have to go through," Mike Trout said. "He hit it right on the nose the first couple of years."

-- Reporting from Tempe, Ariz.

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